Oliver Pollak

The 1918-1919 “flu” epidemic took between 2,800 and 7,500 Nebraska lives, 974 of them in Omaha. On July 4, 1919, the weekly Omaha Jewish Bulletin published “Breaking Lives and Homes for Profit.” It read: Fanny Skulke came with...

I am sheltering in place. The health departments of the six Bay Area Counties have ordered stringent social distancing to protect all of us, seniors included. I’m more than a bit of a nut...

Jews in Medicine, Contributions to Health and Healing through the Age by Ronald L. Eisenberg Jerusalem and New York: Urim Publications, 2019, 464 pages, $29.12 This 464-page encyclopedic reference book starts with the Talmud and...

What do you get when you have two films: a husband with a wife from Paris who wants to bury her one-year-old son’s foreskin in Poland; and a brother and a sister from Toronto...

The New York Times reported on February 7, 2019 about a court decision in which the Austrian government has to pay a property owner in Braunau, a town of about 16,000 people in upper Austria, $1.7...

Holocaust Survivors are our Greatest Generation. Their resilience and immigrant contribution to American life is formidable and compelling. The Bay Area is home to between 210,000, and 350,000 Jews. During 2018, the biweekly J of Northern...

Some people are born on days coterminous with holidays like the 4th of July, Christmas and even New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. Others are born on Mother’s Day or Thanksgiving that are Sundays...

Amazon Prime has started running a Canadian comedy drama series set in Toronto. Erica Strange, a thirty-two-year-old single, plucky and career frustrated, is played by Erin Karpluk and her middle age time traveling therapist,...

A conversation over the breakfast table with friends started with the question, “What book do you wish you had not read so you could read it for the first time?” We pushed the concept to...

This story, set in Prague, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Hamburg, and Tel Aviv, is creative non-fiction. It appeared in Spanish in 2012 and was translated into English in 2017. The author found his subject by a...